You've probably seen this before but this is my piece. It's Nyarlathotep as the Queen In Red. I can't express how excited about this zine and being asked to be a part of it. Anyway, stay tuned for some great one off posts in April!

Friday, March 27, 2015

DOUGHY NIGHTMARE"The hand retreated through the opening, scraping the edge, and a huge vague face peered down with eyes like blobs of dough."

"For the flood was composed of bodies which clambered over one another, clutching for the trapped rat. The rat was tearing at the pudgy hands, ripping pieces from the doughy flesh, but that seemed not to affect them at all. Huge toothless mouths gaped in the puffy faces, collapsed inward like senile lips, sucking loudly, hungrily. Three of the bloated heads fell on the rat, and she hear its squeals above their sucking."

"Great moist nostrils were dilating and vanishing in their noseless faces. Could they see her light with their blobs of eyes, or were they smelling her terror?"

"Once, delirious, she'd heard all the sounds around her grow stealthily padded, but this softness was far worse. She was trying both to stand back and to jab the lift button, quite uselessly; the doors refused to budge. The doughy shapes would pile in like tripe, suffocating her, putting out the flame, gorging themselves on her in the dark. The one that had ridden the lift was slithering down the outside to join them."

"Swollen hands were thumping them, soft fingers like grubs were trying to squeeze between them, but already the lift was sailing upward."

"The lift's doors opened, and the doughy face lurched in, its fat white blind eyes bulging, its avid mouth huge as a fist. It took her a moment prolonged as a nightmare to realize that it had been crushed between the lift and shaft - for as the doors struggled open, the face began to tear."Ramsey Campbell, Down There

Thursday, March 26, 2015

"He was sure he hadn't turned here on his way to the dock; he would have noticed the row of whitish tires in the left-hand alley, tires stacked together like a pipe. In the intermittent moonlight they seemed to squirm restlessly, and he was glad he didn't have to pass them."

"He needed all his wits to figure out the way back, before the fitful moonlight convinced him that the whitish tires were squirming silently, mouth open, down the alley toward him. They looked rather large for tires."

"He closed his eyes and clung to the metal, then he recommenced climbing, mechanically but carefully. Matta's game had had something like a worm, a maggot, carved on the box-something fat and sinuous."

"He was still resting at the top of the ladder when the moon-colored fat-lipped mouth, yawning wide as its body and wider than his head, stooped toward him."

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

BENIGHTED OFFSPRING III"The
third and last was worse still; the figure grovelling in the shadow of
the tower - a shadow, Heather was eager to realise, that wouldn't have
existed given the blackness of the sky - had an almost perfect child's
face except for the single huge eye perched on top like an egg in a
cup."

Monday, March 23, 2015

"It showed a small creature crouching on all fours beside a tower. Despite its lack of a mouth and its enormous eyes that looked trapped by an unnaturally lightless sky, it reminded her far too much of a toddler."

Friday, March 20, 2015

"It was red as rust, featureless except for bulbous protrusions like hills. Except that of course they weren't immense. A rusty red globe covered with lumps, then. That was all, but that couldn't explain why he felt as if the whole of him were magnetized to it through his eyes. It seemed to hang ponderously, communicating a thunderous sense of imminence, of power. But that was just its unfamiliarity, Ingels thought, struggling against the suction of boundless space; just the sense of its intrusion. It's only a planet, after all. Pain was blazing along his thighs. Just a red warty globe."

"Then it moved"

"It was blurring, that was it, although it was a cold windless day air movements must be causing the image to blur, the surface of a planet doesn't move, it's only a planet, the surface of a planet doesn't crack, it doesn't roll back like that, it doesn't peel back for thousands of miles so you can see what's underneath, pale and glistening. When he tried to scream air whooped into his lungs as if space had exploded a vacuum within him."

"'Don't you see?' Ingles shouted at Bert among the packed faces. 'It closed its eye when it saw us coming!"'

Thursday, March 19, 2015

"I disliked the vast footprints which led between the leering figures, and still more disliked the disturbingly gnawed bones of huge animals which were strewn across the plain, for I felt that I knew the cause of these horrors, and knew the abnormality of the colossi, if only I could place it. Then came those clumping footsteps behind em, startlingly close; and as I turned and saw what came striding across that field of unholy carvings, I knew the answer to both questions. It was humanoid - almost - as it pounded through the maze of statues; but it towered above the hundred-foot figures. And the atrocious thing which I glimpsed as I fled from that shrine to cosmic accidents was the eyelessness of the living colossus and the way the hair of the scalp grew in the sockets where the eyes should have been."

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

"Then a door in the opposite wall crashed open, and I remembered the whispered legend of the guardian of this weapon of a lost race. But I knew how to use the weapon's fullest power, and through it I focused mental waves to blast apart the many-legged furry thing which scuttled from the opened door, its abominably shrunken heads waving on hairy, scrawny necks."

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

"They believed in a legendary plant-race which inhabited the bottom of a sheer-sided pit in the outer regions of the country in which the city lay."

"Then came a splashing in that darkness, and a huge purple moist blossom rose from it, its petals opening and closing hungrily. But the greatest abnormality of the thing which splashed out of the pit was its green tentacles, tipped with many-fingered hands of unholy beauty, which it held yearningly towards the point where the sacrifices

Monday, March 16, 2015

WHITE PULPY THING"They were oval, two-legged, dwarved things, scarcely two feet high, without arms or head, but with a gaping moist grey mouth at the centre of their bodies, which were of a spongy white pulp."Ramsey Campbell, The Insects From Shaggai

Friday, March 13, 2015

"It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things."

"They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes -- immense, bronze-coloured, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost -- rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins."

"For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island."

Thursday, March 12, 2015

This
coming Saturday is Algernon Blackwood's birthday and to celebrate, tomorrow
I'll be posting an monster from his classic reality-bending short story The Willows.

Blackwood was born in England but spent a large part of his life in North America. He had an eclectic array of jobs in both the US and Canada including, a journalist for the New York Times, a dairy farmer, a bartender, violin teacher and model.

He was also a Grade A weirdo! In a good way. He was a member of The Ghost Club in London as well as the Hermetic Order Of the Golden Dawn. Not only that but he studied Rosicrucianism, Buddhism and occultism.

He was also an avid outdoorsman. This, along with his love of the esoteric, influenced his fiction and helped him produce some of the most beloved weird fiction of all time.

He's probably most notable in horror fiction circles for his stories The Willows and The Wendigo. The latter of which directly influenced August Derleth and his Ithaqua stories. His short story about "werecats" entitled Ancient Sorceries was the inspiration for the classic Val Lewton chiller The Cat People.

Blackwood's tales tend to be insidious, slow creepers as opposed to the climactic, sanity-cracking crescendos found in other weird fiction. His protagonists have their wits ground down rather than shattered. Isolation, paranoia, wide open spaces and lurking, unnamed menace are the antagonists in my favorite Blackwood stories. You should check out some of his work if you're not already a devotee.

"Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet
infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours,
is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may
be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s
genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute
fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences,
or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations
and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision."